Newsletter archive: Autumn 2000

My
Favourite Painting -
Evocations of a vase of flowers

Claude
Monet, Vase of Flowers, c.1881-82

I sat facing
Claude Monet's Vase of Flowers at the dinner party that the Institute
held for the Getty Trustees in October 1983. The Trustees were staying
at Claridges and had never met before outside California. I had then just
been pressed into chairing the Executive Committee for the Appeal to raise
the funds for the Institute to move from 20 Portman Square to the north
block of Somerset House; a daunting task, but a challenge that I looked
forward to. The dinner was a grand occasion indeed, and a selection of
the French Impressionists had been brought from the gallery in Woburn
Square to adorn the walls of the reception rooms in Home House for this
dinner party. The picture captivated me with its careless display of mallow
flowers and its impressionistic colouring. I love flowers and I love food,
and the dinner was a happy and splendid augury for the adventure that
the Institute was about to undertake, and which I felt then that Samuel
Courtauld would have approved of because it would bring the pictures back
to the Institute again.

I learned later
that the Vase is one of Monet's last still lifes, and although
he painted it in 1881-2 he did not complete it until the end of his life
and signed and sold it in 1920. His letters tell us that he had great
difficulty with his large flower paintings of this period and he went
back thankfully to landscapes when he was able to sell them. You can see
how he is trying to break away from the then structured convention of
still life painting with the daubs and dashes of colours. The painting
had been with two dealers and Samuel Courtauld bought it in 1923. The
canvas appears in photographs of the interior of Monet's house at Giverny.
It is an arrangement of flowers that I can imagine in the centre of the
table at the entrance of a Restaurant in France, and for me it evokes
the delights of the meal to come.

It seems entirely appropriate that later Monet stayed regularly at The
Savoy, and painted his views of the river, the bridges and the Houses
of Parliament from his corner suite there. He must have enjoyed the culinary
skills of Escoffier. It is perhaps sad that he could not have dreamed
that some of his greatest paintings would eventually be hung in the neighbouring
Somerset House a short way down the river. Long may they hang close to
the Thames which Monet obviously loved nearly as much as his own garden
at Giverny on the Seine.